作者：Casey Harison

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The french left and the legacy of the commune

The Paris Commune as symbol and lesson is by no means an unexplored topic. The most cogent scholarly treatment was by the historian of French Marxism, Georges Haupt (1928–1978), who noted that even in his own day “the Commune still arouses partisan passions; every tendency claiming to belong to the working-class movement still tries to surround itself with the halo of 1871 and declare itself to be its only legitimate heir”.(13)?Though Haupt considered most of the scholarship about the event to be profoundly politicized—“brandished as an example … partisan … totally unhistorical … [or] pseudo-historical”—he also understood this tendency, given that the Commune had for the first time provided workers with their own revolution, as opposed to the “bourgeois” French revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848. For workers and their supporters, the Commune quickly “became an idea, a profession of faith, and a confirmation of a? historical future, of the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution”; and through its commemoration—this “holy tradition,” as Rosa Luxemburg labeled it—not only the French, but also the European proletariat “became conscious of itself”.(14)

At the same time, from Haupt’s perspective in the second half of the twentieth century, the “absence of any synthesis” in the historiography was “striking,” particularly because critical questions remained unanswered. Among these was an obvious one: how did workers actually make sense of the history of 1871? As Haupt noted, “There can be no doubt that the working classes were keenly interested in the heroic tale,” not only in France, but also in Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain and China. He framed the central issue this way: “whether the tradition and the awakening of class-consciousness caused by the Commune were merely the product of the popular imagination, or if they were sustained and shaped by the written and spoken word and by images, in other words by ideological interpretations projected into the working-class consciousness.”(15)

For popular audiences, the impact of the Communard Prosper Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871 following its publication in 1876 and subsequent translation into several languages contributed to idealizing the event. However, much of the continuing notoriety of the Commune had to do not with the interest of workers but of intellectuals. Marx’s The Civil War in France (1871) was particularly crucial in this regard.(16)?The Commune was, wrote Marx in a well-known phrase, the “glorious harbinger of a new society.”(17)?Though his understanding of 1871 had been limited to what he could glean from newspaper accounts and correspondence with friends, Marx nonetheless had divined what he considered the essence of the Commune. Still, even among intellectual leaders of the left, there were serious divides. Marx and the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin split partly over disagreements about 1871.(18)?Later, many “revisionists” and leaders of the German Social Democrats all but rejected its legacy.(19) Over the years, even some on the “revolutionary left,” including Luxemburg and Friedrich Engels, hinted that the Commune may not have really been “socialist.”(20)?Indeed, the Commune’s complex history left it open to a variety of interpretations. Along with the left’s veneration, there emerged from the political right a wave of anti-Communard literature.(21)?Even as its legacy was being disputed, the Commune seemed to fade into a bygone era of revolution. By the start of the twentieth century, the anniversary dates were still celebrated, yet it was unclear how relevant its history was in a world where trade unions and workers’ political parties now had some clout. Writes Haupt of the period: “[the Commune’s] commemoration tended to become part of a ritual, while its legend faded and its tradition was challenged and even rejected.”(22)

Indeed, at the turn of the century, French socialist and labor leaders rarely identified tangible, positive lessons to be drawn from the Commune. This does not necessarily signal a failing on their part. Despite Marx’s endorsement, it was only after the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 that the link between the Paris insurrection and contemporary revolt could be established. In the years before 1917, the suppression of the Commune was as important as its status as the “political form, at last discovered,” as Marx had written in The Civil War in France.(23)?The Commune’s decisive defeat had pushed revolution in France away from the Blanquist and neo-Jacobin tendencies of 1870–71 and toward a variety of evolutionary currents.(24)?Elements of Marx’s interpretation were introduced into France by Jules Guesde during this period, but even for Guesde and his Parti Ouvrier the flavor was gradualist rather than insurrectionary.(25) French socialist leaders writing about the Commune before 1914 stressed not its practical lessons, but its symbolic value.

Louis Dubreuilh (1862–1924), a staff member at the socialist newspaper L’Humanité, the author of La Commune (volume 11 of Jaurès’ massive Histoire socialiste), as well as a frequent speaker at commemorations of 1871, saw the Commune as a critical episode in the history of socialism and the working class: “Before and indeed, above all,” he wrote, “it [the Commune] was proletarian, and therefore socialist, for the proletariat in action can fight for no other end than socialism.”(26)?Yet like so many other accounts, his retelling emphasized the heroism of individual Communards rather than the application of any genuine lessons. Dubreuilh was especially distressed by the Commune’s violent end. Beginning in 1908, excerpts from his history were reprinted in L’Humanité as part of the preparation for the march to Père-Lachaise. Invariably these memorialized valiant and by now well-known episodes: the seizure by the crowd of National Guard cannon at Montmartre which started the rebellion; the martyring of the elderly revolutionary Charles Delescluze; and the final battles on the barricades and at the Mur des Fédérés. Dubreuilh sometimes tied the experiences of 1871 to ongoing events in France, but in order to connect?the “fighting spirit” of the Communards with his own Socialist Party rather than to profit by any practical lessons the rebellion had to offer.(27)

Dubreuilh’s temporizing interpretation took place under the auspices of the foremost French socialist of his day, Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). Aside from his role as a leading political figure, Jaurès was a prolific writer and a historian of some talent. Yet, he did not write at length about the Commune. What can be made of Jaurès’ views on 1871 must be drawn rather from a variety of works produced over many years. The relative absence of writing on so important a topic suggests some of the difficulties it presented to thinkers of Jaurès’ temperament. Inclined as a historian to synthesize France’s revolutionary tradition with the reformist currents of his day, Jaurès struggled to reconcile the violent aspects of the Commune with his own mostly non-confrontational views.(28) While authoring several volumes of the Histoire socialiste, including that on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 (which immediately preceded the Commune and contributed to its eruption), he left the history of the Commune to Dubreuilh. Jaurès did note that 1871 helped make possible the idea of the “general strike,” a tactic of the radical section of the working class that had become influential. Had the Commune won out, he wrote, the social and political evolution of the Third Republic could have been advanced ten years.(29)

Aside from these comparatively small meanings, for Jaurès the real worth of the Commune lay in the possibility that its history could inspire workers to organize. Jaurès was present every year at the Bloody Week commemoration, utilizing the event to rally workers around pressing issues, notably in 1913 when the march coincided with protests against the three-year military service law. In his writings, Jaurès emphasized the heroism of the Communards and the episode’s patriotic and socialist character. The Communards believed themselves to be acting in defense of the “true” Republic and against the defeatism of the national government at Versailles.(30)?The Commune succumbed, he wrote in 1896, because it was isolated from peasants and from workers in provincial cities. More importantly, the Commune failed because it occurred too late: by March 1871, the “integrity” of the nation had been undermined by France’s surrender in February 1871, so that the Communards began from an impossible situation.(31)?Jaurès later wrote that 1871 represented a struggle of the “republican and partly socialist workmen of Paris” against the “country squires come out from their small country homes for the occasion.”(32) Elsewhere, he implicitly criticized the unwillingness of the Communards to accept the results of the election of February 1871 (which sent a conservative majority to the National Assembly), writing: “A minority that having taken part in the elections and having accepted them as a gauge, should then attempt to go against the will of the majority by violence, would be in an utterly false position.”(33)?If the Commune had any lessons to offer in revolutionary tactics, Jaurès did not take note.

These remarks reveal some of Jaurès’ ambivalence. For him, the Commune held an honored position in the revolutionary tradition, yet its violent trajectory did not mesh with his own brand of reformist socialism. Disdainful of its politics and appalled by the bloodshed of May 1871, Jaurès nonetheless could not ignore the Commune’s symbolic value. Indeed, his annual commemorative articles in L’Humanité never failed to glorify the heroism of the Communards, in whose sacrifice he recognized the “audacity and hope” that gave force to the radical stream of French history.(34) Nor did Jaurès see the efforts of the Communards as important just for France, since they had also fought “for all Europe.”(35) Likewise, he praised the dedication and heroism of the famous Communard Louise Michel, even as he personally kept her at arm’s length during the Third Republic. Jaurès’ respectful yet aloof attitude toward the legacy of 1871 was typical of many on the left. The disunity of the Commune’s government, the lack of direction in its political, economic and military endeavors, its neo-Jacobin overtones and, most of all, its awful suppression, seemed to offer little in the way of answers to the problems faced by a growing industrial and liberal democratic state. Where Lenin would see the Commune as the start of the modern revolutionary movement, others viewed it as the end of a generation of insurrection and defeat dating from the June Days rebellion of 1848.

Like Jaurès, Jules Guesde (1845–1922), found little of theoretical or political value to draw from 1871. Guesde had supported the Commune from outside Paris and then fled France in the repression that followed. Later, in converting to Marxism, he repudiated the Blanquism of his youth. But unlike Marx, Guesde saw the Commune as an aberration.(36) Still, Guesde could sometimes appeal to its history on political or emotional grounds, participating in the amnesty campaign for Communards in the late 1870s and working for the 1879 election to the Chamber of Deputies of the elder statesman of insurrection, Louis-Auguste Blanqui.? Though Guesde saw few lessons to be learned from the Commune, he was defensive of the Communards.(37) Even after mostly retiring from public affairs in 1900, Guesde continued to participate in the Bloody Week commemorations.(38) In 1905, his newspaper Le Socialiste heaped praise on Louise Michel following her death. Guesde spoke at her funeral, while also offering expressions of sympathy for Russian émigrés in Paris.(39) But even at those moments when the connections between the Commune and the revolution of 1905 seemed obvious, Guesde and Le Socialiste by and large declined to make them.

Edouard Vaillant (1840–1915) probably bridged the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French revolutionary traditions better than anyone, both intellectually and through his own life-story. Perhaps no one, except Michel, epitomized 1871 as much as Vaillant. He had personally taken part in the Commune and then after its defeat gone into temporary exile. For a time he identified with the Blanquists before becoming interested in Marx, breaking with the former after they threw their support behind the proto-fascist Boulanger movement in the 1880s. In disavowing the insurrectionary methods of Blanquism, Vaillant opted for an approach nearer to that of revisionism, emphasizing politics over rebellion. Eventually, Vaillant became a stalwart of the Socialist Party.(40)

Vaillant was active in contemporary politics, but he also reveled in France’s revolutionary past. Where Jaurès seemed uncomfortable fitting the Commune into the pattern of French history, Vaillant embraced it as a vital element of the nascent working-class movement. The distinctive trait of the Commune, he wrote, was its political and class character: “working class, socialist and revolutionary.”(41) At the same time, it had taught workers that, though they must organize as a class, they should not become isolated within society.(42) By the early 1900s, as a well-known politician and “Old Communard,” Valliant was a featured speaker at the Bloody Week commemorations. On these occasions, he would reaffirm the call for revolution and class solidarity, while reiterating certain themes: the continuing relevance of the Commune for workers across the world; the original spontaneity and complexity of the uprising; and the heroism of the Communards. His listeners could also expect to be reminded not to forget the fate of their brothers of 1871.(43) Linking the “revolutionary” and “socialist” Commune with the current condition of workers, and insisting upon this theme year after year, Vallaint was instrumental in implanting? its history as a lesson in solidarity for the French working class, even as he counseled—by word and by deed—moderation.

To look ahead, the years 1914–21 would see important, sometimes divisive developments for the French left, punctuated by the experience of the Great War and the revolution of 1917. Jaurès was assassinated in 1914, and Vaillant, who rallied to the wartime Union Sacrée even as he continued to lead marches to Père-Lachaise, died in 1915.(44) With the passing of two of its favored participants, and with so many workers at the front, anniversary celebrations of Bloody Week during the war were subdued. Still, with the momentous events in Russia in 1917, a new appreciation of their revolutionary heritage would be introduced to the French working class and their leaders.